[PATCH v14 08/14] mm: multi-gen LRU: support page table walks

[Peter Zijlstra]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2022 at 07:10:46PM -0700, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> Maybe we should just bite the bullet, and say that we only support
> x86-32 with 'cmpxchg8b' (ie Pentium and later).
> 
> Get rid of all the "emulate 64-bit atomics with cli/sti, knowing that
> nobody has SMP on those CPU's anyway", and implement a generic x86-32
> xchg() setup using that try_cmpxchg64 loop.
> 
> I think most (all?) distros already enable X86_PAE anyway, which makes
> that X86_CMPXCHG64 be part of the base requirement.
> 
> Not that I'm convinced most distros even do 32-bit development anyway
> these days.
> 
> (Of course, if we require X86_CMPXCHG64, we'll also hit some of the
> odd clone CPU's that actually *do* support the instruction, but do not
> report it in cpuid due to an odd old Windows NT bug. IOW, things like
> the Cyrix and Transmeta CPU's did support the instruction, but had the
> CX8 bit clear because otherwise NT wouldn't boot. We may or may not
> get those cases right, but I doubt anybody really has any of those old
> CPUs).
> 
> We got rid of i386 support back in 2012. Maybe it's time to get rid of
> i486 support in 2022?
> 
> That way we could finally get rid of CONFIG_MATH_EMULATION too.

Would love that; but as pointed out, there's still a few stragglers out
there. OTOH, they *could* use one of the LTS kernels.